My Calvino

Now there's a good-looking and brilliant writer. He would have been 82 this year if not for the brain hemorrhage that took his blessed life. But I'm sure the heavens must be rejoicing the natal day of my favorite fictionist of all time!

"Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time? "

"Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separate universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it? "

both from If On A Winter's Night A Traveler

"Yet, even now, every time (and it is often) that I find I do not understand something, then, instinctively, I am filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp the other knowledge, found and lost in an instant."

from The Flash

"Among Chuan-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. 'I need another five years,' said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and,in an instant, with a single stroke,he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen."

from On Quickness, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

I'm Only Sleeping

When I wake up early in the morning,
Lift my head, I'm still yawning
When I'm in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed, float up stream

Please don't wake me, no don't shake me
Leave me where I am
I'm only sleeping

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find, there's no need

Please don't spoil my day I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

Keeping an eye on the world going by my window
Taking my time

Lying there and staring at the ceiling
Waiting for a sleepy feeling

- The Beatles

***

A good friend once told me that she had the tendency to sleep a lot when she’s depressed. It was later when I found out that she has also been diagnosed with narcolepsy. Regardless, I’ve found this to be true from personal experience three weeks ago, which was weird since I’m a body intolerant of too much sleep except maybe on weekends, and I think the best explanation I got was from Raymond Calbay’s blog, which I will quote:

…I remember reading something that explains why some people are taken to sleeping like hell: it's a panacea to the answerless-ness of the conscious. Sounds like a mystification, but I think makes some sense. It's a paradox though since people would not hesitate to shove under your nose the 123s they understand the moment you sound off a question mark in your sentence. In this city, people only find watermelon seeds useful when its all dried-up already for the chewing. What I'm saying's life gets entangled with business, the practical precision of the evident real. Sleeping unlatches the hold of a wordy world.Sleep offers a blank canvass--the primordial silence of the universe--where dream is a possibility and not a synonym of ambition or protracted action. The body surrenders the sensation of the colored TV and the distant howling of dogs and lets the seed inside stretch its hum. Except in instances of lucid dreaming, I don't remember much of what happens in my sleep, but I always feel better, like I've grown a leaf or two.So in the morning, with death rehearsed, my body reawakens to more life than ever, tilting to the east, to the sun.

Amen.

***

It’s even nicer to find some of the more pleasant dreams resurfacing as reality—like that one night the Dumaguete fellows (along with the UP Bangus group) got together at Conspiracy for a reunion. It had such impact I dreamt about us back to the languorous lifestyle we had this summer for the next following days. Then there’s Nek on her second week here in ABS. It’s like being back in college again—or more accurately, fulfilling what we’ve fancied way back then: to work together in the same company and just be the eternal juvenile mischiefs.

***

My niece Hanna celebrated her third birthday last October 8. Then on the 11th it was her baby brother Gabby’s first. They’re having a joint party set with The Incredibles theme on the 15th. For their invites my sister had “movie tickets” made. This:

What you can’t see--or at least not that clearly--are the “photoshop-ed” faces of my niece and nephew as Dash and Violet. Hilarious.